CLINT Eastwood can make a movie, that’s for sure, but who’d ever have thought that the creator of uber-tough-cop Dirty Harry Callahan would someday embrace the Rodney King “Can’t We All Just Get Along” school of conflict resolution?

If it does, it’ll be a timely award: The desperate battle depicted in the film was at its savage height 62 years ago this morning; the anniversary of the iconic flag-raising was Friday.

Eastwood told the tale of the young warriors captured in combat photographer Joe Rosenthal’s immortal image of that moment in “Flags of Our Fathers,” a companion film to “Letters” released last year.

It’s no surprise, given Hollywood’s mindset, that the young men in “Flags” were depicted less as the true heroes they were than as victims of a cynically manipulative military establishment bent on bolstering fading civilian support for the Pacific war.

The soldiers in “Letters” fare better: They are stoically heroic young men dealt a bad hand, but determined to do their duty with high honor.

Of course, they are all Japanese. The tale is told solely from the – dare one say it – enemy’s perspective.

Eastwood’s take on the battle – that it was fought by men who didn’t want to be there in the first place – wholly misses the mark: Which is that a viciously militaristic Japanese government began to run roughshod over much of Asia in 1931.

And that the killing didn’t stop until America stopped it, in 1945 – but not before losing tens of thousands of young men on scores of fly-specked Pacific death-traps just like Iwo Jima.

An honest rendering of what the Imperial Japanese Army was about in those days would tell the tale of, say, the Bataan Death March from the Japanese perspective. It could explain how hard it is to clean blood and brains off rifle butts after a hard day of beating helpless POWs to death.

Eastwood’s depiction of beleaguered young men, prisoners of history huddling in caves while awaiting their fate, has contemporary relevance, of course.

The parallel with Osama bin Laden – hunkered down somewhere on the Afghan-Pakistani border awaiting his own destiny – seems clear enough.

And maybe that’s the point.

If so, what a pity.

America was dragged into World War II by a metastasizing evil – much as the War on Terror was forced on the nation.

By romanticizing the enemy, Eastwood ill serves history, and corrodes support for the current conflict.